Charles Baxter: There's Something I Want You to Do

He looked down at her. “That’s interesting. You didn’t say you loved me now.” His smile faded. “I said I love you, and you mentioned opera tickets. I hope I’m not being petty, but my love went out to you and was not returned. How come? Did I do something wrong?”

“It was an oversight. No, wait a minute. You’re wrong. I did say that. I did say I love you. I say it a lot. You just didn’t hear me say it this time.”

“No, I don’t think that’s right,” he said, shaking his head like a sad horse, back and forth. “You didn’t say it.”

“Well, I love you currently, ” she said, as a group of German tourists waddled in through the entranceway. “I love you this very minute.” She waited. “What a poor excuse for a quarrel this is. Let’s talk about something else.”

“There,” he said, pointing to a baby-angel. “How about that one? That one will be ours. The doctor says so.” The angel he had pointed to had wings, as they all did, but this one’s arms were outstretched as if in welcome, and the wings were extended as if the angel were about to take flight.

After leaving the chapel, walking down a side street to the old city, they encountered a madwoman with gray snarled hair and only two visible teeth who was carrying a shopping bag full of scrap cloth. She had caught up to them on the sidewalk, emerging from an alleyway, and she began speaking to them in rapid vehement Czech, poking them both on their shoulders to make her unintelligible points. Everything about her was untranslat able, but given the way she was glaring at them, she seemed to be engaged in prophecy of some kind, and Susan intuited that the old woman was telling them both what their future lives together would be like. “You will eventually go back to your bad hotel, you two,” she imagined the old woman saying in Czech, “and you will have your wish, and with that good-hearted husband of yours, you will conceive a child, your firstborn, a son, and you will realize that you’re pregnant because when you fall asleep on the night of your son’s conception, you will dream of a giant raspberry. How do I know all this? Look at me! It’s my business to know. I’m out of my mind.” Eli gently nudged the woman away from Susan, taking his wife’s hand and crossing the street. When Susan broke free from her husband’s grip and looked back, she saw the crone shouting. “You’re going to be so terribly jealous of your husband because of the woman in him !” the old woman screamed in Czech, or so Susan imagined, but somehow that made no sense, and she was still trying to puzzle it out when she turned around and was gently knocked over by a tram that had slowed for the Malostranské stop.

The following commotion— people surrounding her, Elijah asking her nonsensical diagnostic questions — was all a bit of a blur, but only because everyone except for her husband was speaking Czech or heavily accented English, and before she knew it, she was standing up. She looked at the small crowd assembled around her, tourists and citizens, and in an effort to display good health she saluted them. Only after she had done it, and people were staring, did she think that gestures like that might be inappropriate.

“Good God,” Elijah said. “Why’d you do that?”

“I felt like it,” she told him.

“Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” he asked, touching her profession ally. “Here? Or here?”

“It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” she said. “I just got jostled. I lost my balance. Can’t we go have lunch?” The tram driver was speaking to her in Czech, but she was ignoring him. She glanced down at her jeans. “See? I’m not even scuffed up.”

“You almost fell under the wheels,” he half groaned.

“Really, Eli. Please. I’m fine. I’ve never been finer. Can’t we go now?” Strangers were still muttering to her, and someone was translating. When they calmed down and went back to their business after a few minutes, she felt a great sense of relief. She didn’t want anyone to think of her as a victim. She was no one’s and nothing’s victim ever. Or: maybe she was in shock.

“So here we are,” Eli said. “We’ve already been to a chapel, seen a baby, talked to a crazy person, had an accident, and it’s only eleven.”

“Well, all right, let’s have coffee, if we can’t have lunch.”

He held her arm as they crossed the street and made their way to a sidewalk café with a green awning and a signboard that seemed to indicate that the café’s name had something to do with a sheep. The sun was still shining madly in its touristy way. Ashtrays (theirs was cracked) were placed on all the tables, and a man with a thin wiry white beard and a beret was smoking cigarette after cigarette nearby. He gazed at Susan and Elijah with intense indifference. Susan wanted to say: Yes, all right, we’re stupid American tourists, like the rest of them, but I was just hit by a tram! The waiter came out and took their order: two espressos.

“You didn’t see that thing coming?” Elijah asked, sitting up and looking around. “My God. It missed me by inches.”

“I wasn’t hit,” she said. “I’ve explained this to you. I was nudged. I was nudged and lost my balance and fell over. The tram was going about two miles an hour. It happens.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t happen. When has it ever happened?”

“Eli, it just did. I wasn’t thinking. That woman, the one we saw, that woman who was shouting at us…”

“She was just a crazy old lady. That’s all she was. There are crazy old people everywhere. Even here in Europe. Especially here. They go crazy, history encourages it, and they start shouting, but no one listens.”

“No. No. She was shouting at me . She had singled me out. That’s why I wasn’t looking or paying attention. And what’s really weird is that I could understand her. I mean, she was speaking in Czech or whatever, but I could understand her.”

“Susan,” he said. The waiter came with their espressos, daintily placing them on either side of the cracked ashtray. “Please. That’s delusional. Don’t get me wrong — that’s not a criticism. I still love you. You’re still beautiful. Man, are you beautiful. It just kills me, how beautiful you are. I can hardly look at you.”

“I know.” She leaned back. “But listen. Okay, sure, I know it’s delusional, I get that, but she said I was going to be jealous of you. That part I didn’t get.” She thought it was better not to mention that they would have a son.

“Jealous? Jealous of me? For what?”

“She didn’t… say. ”

“Well, then.”

“She said I’d get pregnant.”

“Susan, honey.”

“And that I’d dream of a giant raspberry on the night of conception.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. A raspberry. Please stop.”

“You’re being dismissive. I’m serious. When have I ever said or done anything like this before? Well, all right, maybe a few times. But I can’t stop.”

The man sitting next to them lifted up his beret and held it aloft for a moment before putting it back on his head.

“Yeah, that’s right. Thank you,” Elijah said to the man. He pulled out a bill, one hundred crowns, from his wallet and dropped it on the table. “Susan, we need to get back to the hotel. Okay? Right now. Please?”

“Why? I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”

He gazed at her. He would take her back to the hotel, pretending to want to make love to her, and he would make love to her, but the lovemaking would just be a pretext so that he could do a full hands-on medical examination of her, top to bottom. She had seen him pull such stunts before, particularly in moments when the doctor in him, the force of his caretaking, had overpowered him.